Virgin Media - Cambridge CB2 - Fault / Congestion?

For the last week or two I've had pretty rough internet at times. Massive pings and packet loss.. I thusly reported this to Virgin Media who sent out an engineer to correct the power levels but still getting problems.

Re: Virgin Media - Cambridge CB2 - Fault / Congestion?

Yes congestion for sure and pretty bad. If you see a bloke with horns and a long pointy tail on ice skates there's an outside chance VM may get around to fixing it. If not look to moving on if at all possible.

Since they released 100Mbps unlimited the number of areas with severe congestion has increased for some reason nobody in VM seems to be able to pinpoint. In the meantime as they can't figure out what the problem may be they've decided to deny having one.

Re: Virgin Media - Cambridge CB2 - Fault / Congestion?

They'll answer it but it takes about a week these days - subscribe to the post.

For me it was - yes your CMTS is overutilised and we've raised fault nnnn (note there appears to be no routine monitoring - they wait for complaints). You'll then have to ask when a fix is scheduled because you can't track these faults in any way yourself - in my case it was three months away. Now some faults remain in place with ever delayed fix dates. In my case there was an unannounced outage of several hours and I was on a new CMTS which was marginally less overloaded than the first. On enquiry that was it - the fix was completed early and the new (still overloaded) connection didn't exceed their limits - over 80% utilisation for 10% of the time - any network running on at over 70% on the tiny local pipes VM use (200down 18up) at the speeds they sell is a horrible experience.

Re: Virgin Media - Cambridge CB2 - Fault / Congestion?

Looks like classic congestion, though at a guess it is only one or two 50 or 100 Meg users causing it.

A single 100Mb user can use 55% of an upstream port's capacity. Sadly this doesn't work with the amounts of modems Virgin can sometimes have on upstream ports. They are hoping that upstream bonding will make a big difference, and it should. 2 x 10Mb users on a 36Mb channel works better than a single 10Mb user on an 18Mb channel for the same reasons as the datastream 'skinny pipe' issues way back when.

Re: Virgin Media - Cambridge CB2 - Fault / Congestion?

If the issue is 100 Meg users using a dispproportionate amount of traffic, then the curbs on that product will appear.

As VM are driven by marketing and BT Infinity will soon be 80Mbps unlimited imo it's a whole lot more likely that there will simply be more congested areas unless the forthcoming changes to traffic management are pretty draconian.